Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, Queen Christina is a pre-code historical biopic which stars Greta Garbo as the eponymous monarch, who struggles to balance the wishes of her subjects and advisors with her own desires. John Gilbert plays Antonio, a handsome Spanish envoy who becomes the queen’s great love.

Directed by Robert Z. Leonard (with un-credited assistance from Buster Keaton), In The Good Old Summertime is a Technicolour musical reworking of Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around The Corner (1940), starring Judy Garland as Veronica Fisher, and Van Johnson as Andrew Larkin, the shop workers who do not realise they are each other’s anonymous pen pal.

A Bill of Divorcement is a pre-code drama following a day in the life of a dysfunctional English family at Christmastime, starring Katharine Hepburn in her big-screen debut as Sydney Fairfield, Billie Burke as her mother Meg, and John Barrymore as her father Hilary, who escapes the mental hospital he has spent twenty years in due to shell shock.

Barbara Stanwyck was not only one of classic Hollywood’s most prolific actresses, but also one of its most versatile. Throughout the 1940s and 50s she starred in a number of noir pictures and, despite the heavy conventions of the genre, turned in remarkably different performances in each. In this post I’ll be looking at three of her noir films from the 1940s, and how they demonstrate her unique and chameleon-like talent for the genre.

Directed by James Tinling, Arizona To Broadway is a pre-code romantic crime drama starring James Dunn as prolific conman Smiley Wells, and Joan Bennett as Lynn Martin, who becomes embroiled in his schemes.

Rebecca, the classic thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock, stars Laurence Olivier as the brooding and mysterious Maxim de Winter, and Joan Fontaine as his second wife, haunted and tormented by the lingering presence of the first Mrs de Winter, who seems to haunt every inch of the grand Manderley Hall which the de Winters call home.

Directed by Clarence Brown, Possessed is a romantic drama starring Joan Crawford as Marian Martin, a factory girl determined to make a better life for herself in the big city, and Clark Gable as Mark Whitney, her mentor in high-class living and the object of her affections.

Directed by Michael Curtiz, Four’s A Crowd is a romantic comedy starring Rosalind Russell as reporter Jean Christy, Errol Flynn as editor-in-chief Robert Lansford, Patric Knowles as the newspaper’s owner Pat Buckley, and Olivia de Havilland as his fiancée Lorri.

In 1916, a young girl named Lucille LeSueur cooked meals and scrubbed dishes for her fellow students at St. Agnes Academy, a Catholic boarding school in Kansas City where she was enrolled as a work student in exchange for her board and education. She would grow up to become Joan Crawford, the ultimate movie star, for whom glamour was a way of life.

Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, Golden Boy is a romantic melodrama set in the cutthroat world of boxing, starring Adolphe Menjou as manager Tom Moody, Barbara Stanwyck as his girlfriend Lorna, and William Holden as talented young violinist Joe Bonaparte, who decides to become a boxer.